Writer's Resources:

2004 Competition Winner: Pascale Petit

"When The Wounded Deer was a winner in the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition it gave me a real confidence boost about these rather daring poems. That spur at the beginning, of being a first stage winner in the competition, and having a gorgeously produced pamphlet, gave me the confidence to believe in the sequence, that it wasn't crazy to write poems in the voice of the extraordinary Mexican artist."— Pascale Petit

THE WOUNDED DEER

I have a woman's facebut I'm a little stag,because I had the ballsto come this far into the forest,to where the trees are broken.The nine points of my antlershave battledwith the nine arrows in my hide.

I can hear the bone-sawin the ocean on the horizon.I emerged from the watersof the Hospital for Special Surgery.It had deep blue under-rooms.

And once, when I opened my eyestoo quickly after the graft,I could see right throughall the glass ceilings,up to where lightning forkedacross the New York skylike the antlers of sky-deer,rain arrowing the herd.

Small and dainty as I amI escaped into this canvas, where I look back at youin your steel corset, paintingthe last splash on my hoof.